Jonathan Morse

A professor of English at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus in Honolulu, I write offline about modernist literature, with a tentacle extending back into the nineteenth century to let me write about Emily Dickinson as well. But here online I write about photography and the ways that its images work together with language.

Like this:

The provenance of this stereophotograph of the World War II Japanese battleship Musashi isn’t indicated online, but a lot of its art history is preloaded. The shell-deflecting curves of the ship’s armor, for instance, are prominent in its image for reasons having to to with the history of Art Deco, and the camera’s heroic angle, gazing raptly upward, was probably designed in the studio of Alexander Rodchenko, artist of the totalitarian. Then too there is the matter of the photograph’s dramatically dark tones, which were probably generated in-camera by a red filter.

In the eye, then, per design, the twinned Musashi artworks, one image for the left eye and one for the right, are massed and ungraspable and black. Blocking out the light, they push together into your senses, take control, and merge into a single black ingot. After that, the ingot is no longer something capable of being seen, in the light, from without. It has become the material for a stamping mill broaching darkness within.

Forty years earlier, a different ship in a different world looked as innocent as a maiden as it struck a happy pose and waved its flags with both hands. The ship was wearing white, too, and the camera was looking down at it as if it were little. I can imagine Musashi having been photographed by a professionally adoring, professionally upward-gazing modernist woman like Margaret Bourke-White or Leni Riefenstahl, but the idea of a happy little boat seems to have brought out something protectively chivalric in Messrs. Underwood and Underwood’s cameragentleman.

But the happy little boat happened to be another battleship, with a battleship’s single purpose. Guns got bigger and armor got thicker in the course of the battleship’s half-century of naval dominance, but from the beginning of the era to the end, the corpses floating in each successive wake followed only one model of naked form. If the older corpses seem somehow simpler than the more recent ones, that’s only because more of their historical detail has been eaten by the fish.

This believing in an illusion of simplicity is an ordinary error committed by beginners at living in time. Because we were once younger and more ignorant than we are now, we think the world was younger and more ignorant too. But in these two particular artworks, the error can be corrected by a simple trip to the eye doctor. The corrective process isn’t just good for us, either; it’s also educational.

Go ahead with it, then. To begin the process of correction, assemble each stereo pair into an anaglyph. Then bring the two anaglyphs into juxtaposition. This formal art-maneuver will reduce the historical distances between the two images — distances across time, distances between democracy and fascism — to almost nothing. After that, with history controlled for and minimized, there will be little for the eye to do except see.

So see.

Once they’ve been brought together at a single moment, the two images from different times will simplify to a single timeless idea. It will be what the two otherwise different battleship images have in common: a battleship idea, the idea of that which is death-dealing. Having been subsumed into a general idea of the death-dealing, each separate death-dealing image can shed its distracting photographic artifacts of (on the one hand) black and (on the other) white. The polychrome stains of life and death will then become imaginable again, and after that we’ll need to do just one more eye exercise.

It will be this. To see the colors as they were before they became a part of history’s blacks and whites, we will only have to unlearn the way of seeing that we once learned from a block of black steel.

Like this:

Virginia, July or August 1862. A Conestoga wagon fords the Rappahannock and approaches the lines of the Union army, carrying slaves traveling in search of freedom. As they enter Timothy O’Sullivan’s visual field, he opens the twin shutters of his stereoscopic camera. On a cracked glass plate, its record of the moment survives. Click any image below to enlarge it.

In Photoshop I separate the two images and equalize their brightness and contrast.

Then I recombine them into an anaglyph.

After I have viewed my work product through specialized lenses

I appear to have consummated the illusion of a three-dimensional experience that Timothy O’Sullivan’s camera created a century and a half ago. Yet I haven’t been able to see in anything like the freedom that the moment of passage through the water demanded of me. There’s this to remember about specialized lenses:

To preserve the illusion of the Emerald City, Dorothy and Toto are fitted with emerald-colored glasses

if we can see the passage to freedom only with their aid, perhaps the moment when a camera opened onto freedom was (as the Penseroso says)

Like this:

For Charles Dickens’s bicentennial this month, The Atlantic has posted an online appreciation and a stereopticon portrait. The two images in the portrait aren’t at all balanced; one is much darker and more contrasty than the other. But here’s what an anaglyph (red-and-blue composite; requires glasses with red and blue lenses) looks like after some cosmetic work in Photoshop. Click to enlarge.